2022 Goals (besides surviving)

Let’s talk goals. January is almost over, which means the year is 1/12th over. 1/12 of my goals should be completed right? Not exactly. I’m in the middle of a course to become a Certified Salary Negotiation Specialist, and the other day the instructor said, “if an employer says yes to every one of your requests, you didn’t actually win. It means you probably left money on the table and should have asked for more. You want to actually get to ‘no’ because it means you got everything they had to offer.” That’s the approach I’m taking to my goals this year. Yes, I want to achieve my goals and I want them to be achievable, but I also want them to be a reach. If I achieve every single one of them, then I probably didn’t set them high enough. It’s ok if I don’t cross off every single one of them as long as I’m working toward them.

So what are my goals? As usual, I separated them into categories: Health, Work, Relationship, Finance, Other, and of course the all-important: Social Media.

For some reason, the health ones come easily to me. Maybe that means I’m not aspiring high enough. I don’t believe in calorie-counting or “dieting,” so my goals are generally more about fitness and wellness. My first goal: get 8 hours of sleep at least once a week. I kind of assume I will not achieve this. But I can try! One less Netflix binge-a-thon a week. Will that episode of Too Hot To Handle be there tomorrow? Yes. This sleep goal is even less likely to occur later in the year if I succeed in getting pregnant. More on that later.

Also related to health, last year, I set a goal not to order in food more than twice a week, which fits well into my finance category. Last year, I found it was an easily achievable goal, so I didn’t even mention it this year although it continues to be an ongoing goal. Sometimes when I come home from vacation and the fridge is empty, I fail here, but I have learned to stock up the freezer before I go, and first thing when I come home, I move chicken/salmon/turkey burgers etc. into the fridge.

With fitness goals, I love to work out, so I tend to do well in this area. But I set some serious reach goals here. This year I am setting the goals of 100 Orangetheory classes, 200 Peloton cycling and strength classes, and a 52-week Peloton streak. That’s right, I want to do at least one class every week on Peloton, but this streak includes sleep meditation and stretching. Even so, as for the 200 Peloton cycling and strength classes in addition to Orangetheory? That may be a reach. But I often do a 30 minute class and a 5-minute cooldown, and that counts as 2, so ya never know! I also set a goal to “try” yoga. I should have probably been more specific there. It’s January 28th and I have not yet “tried” it. I hateeee yoga. I’m so inflexible. Which makes me hate yoga. And I am so inflexible because I hate yoga. It’s a vicious cycle.

My work goal, as I already mentioned, is to become a Certified Salary Negotiation Specialist. I am happy to report that I am well on my way there. Considering there is a course deadline of February 17th, that is good news.

As for finance, I have a lot of goals. Many of them are based on retirement savings. I would like to max out my 403B and my Roth IRA. I may need to move some money around to do that, but I am going to try. I don’t have many other savings goals because I’m getting married this year, and even with a small wedding, it’s likely to make a dent in my net worth. My other finance goal is to understand American Express Points. I know this seems like a weird, small goal, but I want to be able to maximize or at least use them wisely. For years they have been pooling in my account, and in theory, if I can use them well, I have over $5,000 of points in there. I am trying to convince Chris to talk me through this whole concept, but he knows too much and I seem to get confused easily. Hopefully by the end of the year I will understand.

My relationship goals are BIG. I mean BIG. Like the biggest that a relationship goal can be. Wedding, kids, the whole thing. Well maybe not multiple kids. Actually, probably not any kids this year, because #science, but I would like to start attempting to have kids. That’s the fun part, right? Not necessarily the easy part, but I do need to take some initial steps, like taking my IUD out. Remember when that sucker disappeared? That was a fun blog post. Anyway, it’s still in there now, so that would be step #1. My other relationship goal is to have at least one date night per month. We failed on this one last year, but this month we already went to see Come From Away, which was a lot of fun. There’s nothing quite like grabbing a $10 cab to Broadway, ah, New York City life.

My Social Media goals are pretty lofty regarding my braiding business. I want to work on my TikTok skills because everyone says that is the best way to grow an audience. That means both posting regularly, increasing my followers, getting better at video transitions, all of it. I am in my 30’s so this is not easy. Just this week, I pulled something in my neck making one. I am clearly not the demographic of content creator they had in mind. But it’s kind of fun so I plan on continuing to try. My goal is 500 followers and posting at least once a week. I gained 9 followers last week, so I’m off to a good start. I also want to gain followers on Instagram (5000 would be ideal, but a reach), which means posting more reels. Everything is about video these days! I also want to continue to post on my blog more. Ideally twice a month. January is going well, since this is my third post, but I tend to fall off on posting later in the year. I’m going to work on it! You all need to comment and keep me accountable.

My last category of goals is “Other,” which means leftovers. And not necessarily the good kind like lukewarm pizza or cold Chinese food. My first miscellaneous goal is to make the bed every day. Especially now that the Peloton is in the bedroom, I HATE getting on the bike and seeing a mess. Plus, I’m hoping that getting into a made bed will entice me to sleep earlier, helping me reach my 8 hours of sleep goal. Another random goal: go to 3 Broadway shows. So far, I’ve been to one and it’s January, so it’s going well! I keep entering the lottery to get cheap seats and I win probably 10% of the time. Not bad odds! I also have a goal of traveling to two new countries. Considering the amount of weddings I have this year, and the hope to get pregnant, I’m not sure if this will happen. Maybe we will go on a honeymoon? But maybe not. We’ll see. My last goal is to make $2000 braiding hair. Considering I was supposed to have my first 2022 client tonight and she canceled because she has Covid, it’s not looking good. We’ll see.

Those are my goals! Do you have any lofty or not-lofty ones you want to share? Let me know in the comments.

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2021 – The year that was a decade

Is it just me, or does every year now feel like a decade? I sat down to try and begin a blog about 2021 and I got so overwhelmed I put it off for 2 weeks. I don’t want to bore you with all of the ups and downs – after all, we kind of went through them together. Remember allll the way back at the beginning of 2021 when the vaccines (that’s right, more than one! We had options!) were proved effective and safe? And we thought “wow, this pandemic is going to end! FINALLY!” And then fast-forward to a “decade” later, at the end of 2021, when we had yet another variant and went back to checking positivity percentages every day. Yea, that part kind of sucked. But the good part about living a decade within a single year is, we had some pockets of time that were great!

I usually do a year recap in the form of a bullet journal goals check in. Bad news, I kind of gave up on my bullet journal in June. Oops. Good news, the reason I gave up on it was because I was doing too many fun things and couldn’t keep up! More bad news, I started another bullet journal because I guess I’m a masochist.

Anyway, I was able to achieve a lot of my 2021 bullet journal goals, despite the fact that we lived on the cusp of anxiety attack every day of the year.

Health

Mental health? Precarious. Physical health: not too shabby!

I was able to complete 260 Peloton cycling classes, which was 60 more than my goal. Also, I completed 100 strength classes and 100 stretching classes on Peloton. Not to mention, I joined Orangetheory and I got 10,000 steps/day all but 9 days of the entire year. Remember those mental health walks from 2020? I’m still going on them. I walked a total of 4,986,793 steps.

 Also, I achieved my goal of only ordering in food once or twice a week. I know that may seem easy, but in New York, not so much.

Here’s what I didn’t achieve:

  • Going to a dermatologist. I tried, but when I got there I discovered they didn’t take my insurance despite their assurances on the phone. Then I gave up because I was pissed.
  • Drinking water every day before coffee. We have limited joys now, coffee is one of them. I threw this goal down the drain in February.

Work

Honestly, I didn’t write down any work goals. And work has been… CRAZY. My main goals were to get through every week without screaming at any coworkers or shooting myself. I sort of succeeded.

Social Media

Well guys, I failed you again. Every year I try to publish 2 blogs/month and every year I fail. I posted 13 all year. I am going to try and do better! I also failed at getting 5,000 followers on my braiding Instagram, despite going viral for the NYC Marathon. I have been hovering JUST under 4,000 for 3 years now. *shrug*. This next year I’m focusing more on TikTok, but more on that in my next post.

Finance

Crazily, this is the main place where I achieved all of my goals. Despite my major return to international travel, I was able to max out my Roth IRA, reach my goal in my 403B, AND get to a net worth of 60K! This is huge considering the amount of student debt I am still carrying around. Not having to pay any student loans for the entire year definitely helped my finances.

Relationship

I’m still in one, so yay! He tells me he loves me every day, even after I yell at him 900 times for leaving his dishes in the sink. We didn’t go on one date/excursion per month, but Covid made that difficult at times. We almost made it, though! We did some at-home baking with a zoom class, we traveled to Aruba and France together, and best yet, we set a wedding date!! It’s soon. Yikes. Maybe I’ll write more about this, maybe I won’t. So far, I’m the worst future bride I’ve ever met.

Other

These miscellaneous goals were hit or miss. I DID see 3 Broadway shows. Impressive, considering Broadway wasn’t even open all year. I didn’t achieve 3 things on my NYC Bucket List. In fact, I didn’t even complete one of them. I tried to see the Nutcracker but the show was cancelled two days before because of Omicron. I did travel to three new countries (four if you count Monaco). I tried to call a friend once a month, but I really hate talking on the phone. I braided clients for a musical festival, a wedding, Halloween, and two races. Not too shabby considering I spent most of the year avoiding strangers’ faces.

2021 was a wild ride. It felt like 60% of the time, my butt was melded with my couch, and 40% of the time I was out of the country. We moved apartments, we went snorkeling and ATV-ing, Chris ordered from Amazon 100 million times, I did my nails 55 times, and collectively we got 6 new credit cards. 2022 is guaranteed to be a crazy year, too. We already have 4 weddings in the next 5 months, and we are hoping to start trying to have a baby (what?!?). Next week I’ll let you know what my 2022 goals are. Do you have any suggestions?

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